Whoopi Goldberg apologizes for saying Holocaust "is not about race"
Editor’s note: This post contains descriptions that may be triggering for some readers.
Whoopi Goldberg has apologized for insisting that the Holocaust “is not about race.”
During a segment of The View on Monday, the talk show discussed a Tennessee school district’s decision to ban “Maus,” a graphic novel that follows the story of a Holocaust survivor. The McMinn County, Tennessee, Board of Education removed the book from its eighth-grade English Language Arts curriculum due to language and nudity in the novel earlier this month.
During the discussion, Goldberg said that she was surprised that the nudity, and not the Holocaust itself, is what concerned the school board.
“Well, this is white people doing it to white people, so y’all gonna fight amongst yourselves,” Goldberg said about the genocide, just a week after Holocaust Remembrance Day, on Thursday, January 27.
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They then started discussing how some are trying to ban problematic parts of history dealing with race and racism in particular.
“If you’re going to do this, then let’s be truthful about it because the Holocaust isn’t about race,” responded Goldberg.
As her co-stars argued that the Holocaust, which was the systemic persecution and murder of about six million Jewish people, was about white supremacy, Goldberg pushed back, saying that it’s about “two white groups of people.”
“You’re missing the point. The minute you turn it into [a] race, it goes down this alley. Let’s talk about it for what it is — it’s how people treat each other,” she said.
The comments were received with outrage.
Goldberg apologized in a statement on Monday night.
“On today’s show, I said the Holocaust “is not about race but about man’s inhumanity to man.” I should have said it is about both,” she tweeted. “As Jonathan Greenblatt of the Anti-Defamation League shared, ‘The Holocaust was about the Nazi’s systematic annihilation of the Jewish people — who they deemed to be an inferior race.’ I stand corrected.”
— Whoopi Goldberg (@WhoopiGoldberg) February 1, 2022
“The Jewish people around the world have always had my support, and that will never waiver. I’m sorry for the hurt I have caused,” she added.
According to the US Holocaust Museum, the genocide was “driven by a racist ideology that regarded Jews as ‘parasitic vermin.'”
Last week a report by Canadian charity Liberation75 found that a third of students feel the Holocaust was “fabricated or exaggerated,” prompting discussions about the lack of Holocaust education in schools.